One thousand Australian Workplace Agreements have been made available to researchers by the Workplace Authority for use in evaluating the impact they had on Australian workplaces and workers. The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Julia Gillard, announced the release saying it was the first time AWAs had been made available for public scrutiny. Ms Gillard said the AWAs, made between 1 January 2004 and 31 March 2007, had been “manually cleansed” to ensure all personal information was removed. She said the Authority would release the de-identified material to interested researchers this month, enabling them to analyse the agreements and compare them to the provisions of relevant awards.
1000 to be available to researchers
Ms Gillard said over half the AWAs being released were lodged with the Office of the Employment Advocate in the 14 months between the implementation of Work Choices and the introduction of the Fairness Test in May 2007. She said the sample included AWAs that were approved following application of the former no-disadvantage test and those that were made under Work Choices, but before the fairness test. Ms Gillard said from the 810,000 AWAs made during the period, the sample had been chosen to represent industry and employer size and was proportionally representative of the total number of agreements. She said during this period employers could make AWAs with a safety net of only five conditions and that award conditions could be removed or modified by an agreement without compensation. On 20 February 2008 the Government released data compiled and analysed by the Workplace Authority from a sample of 1,748 AWAs lodged between April and October 2006. Ms Gillard said the newly released data confirmed that overtime penalty rate conditions were reduced in Work Choices AWAs, such as in the retail industry where overtime penalty rates dropped by almost 15 per cent. Researchers could obtain the agreements by following the instructions given on the Authority’s website: www.workplaceauthority.gov.au
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